With Q1 well underway, businesses are now deep into executing their 2025 plans. For many CEOs and Boards, the priority this year is clear: reducing time to market and accelerating revenue generation.
What Does Accelerating Time to Revenue Mean?
From conversations with executives, there are various ways to define this:
- Closing more deals.
- Increasing deal pipeline.
- Bringing revenue live faster.
- Reducing the time to launch a new product or service.
- Hiring more salespeople.
Broadly, these can be categorized into two key goals:
- Reducing how long it takes to generate revenue.
- Generating higher revenue within the same time frame.
For example, an enterprise SaaS company could either shorten its deal cycle (from discovery to contract) or close more deals within the same time frame. Both require different strategies, contingent on internal factors, growth trajectory, financials, and macro conditions.
Why Many Companies Struggle to Accelerate Revenue
Unfortunately, the success rate for mid-to-large-sized SaaS/tech companies hitting accelerated plans is strikingly low—only about 20% achieve their targets.
Why? The root cause is a failure to execute effectively in the set direction.
This does not mean you throw more resources at your problem, have a few offsites to align your teams, and track OKRs in an effort to better execute.
This is where companies will typically spend 80% of the time but only see 20% of the impact.
The Weight Loss Analogy: Execution Beyond the Obvious
After my last college football game, I lost 80 lbs in 6 months.
People often asked about my workout routine—the visible part of the transformation. I.e. “What was your workout routine? Do you lift weights or run on the treadmill? How many times did you do abs a week?”
Looking back, the interesting thing was that no one asked how I stayed on track, or why I chose certain types of workouts, or how much my diet changed. Most questions were always about the most visible aspect. weight loss = workout.
However, the real success came from the unglamorous foundational work:
- Building a detailed plan.
- Adjusting nutrition and implementing intermittent fasting.
- Creating a workout strategy tailored to my goals.
- Preparing for plateaus with contingency plans.
- Adding buffers and off days
Similarly, in business, focusing solely on visible tasks (or often glorified) like meetings, board updates, and project management misses the bigger picture.
80% of the impact actually depends on:
- Identifying the right problems to solve (many get this wrong)
- Laying the groundwork to solve them effectively.
In my experience, many executives don’t stop and ask, “Are we solving the right problem? Is our strategy even the right strategy?”
We fail to ask the tough questions upfront and spend the bulk of our time grinding away without ever zooming out. Eventually falling short of our plans, and personally burned out.
In this example, I would have seen minimal results if I had skipped all the strategy and planning and just hit the gym. I would’ve spent time on the wrong things, running for hours, or maximizing my personal bests on bench press, with no results to show, and eventually giving up (which is what happened the first time I tried)
Common Execution Pitfalls
Here are some examples of what execution failures look like in reality:
- Trading short-term growth for long-term sustainability.
- Investing in products customers don’t want.
- Building forecasts without understanding sales cycle complexities.
- Hiring senior leaders without budget or strategic alignment.
- Setting unrealistic targets misaligned with operational capacity.
- Focusing 100% of effort on sales, with 0 thought to post live / customer success
- Working deals not aligned with product roadmap or financial plans
Each of these issues stems from jumping into “doing” without strategic preparation. Without alignment, discipline, and rigor, even superstar teams will struggle.
Execution as a Discipline
Execution isn’t just about implementation; it’s about sustained strategy, planning, and adaptation.
You have to see end-to-end, and execution acts as a qualification layer of any successful strategy, similar to a qualifier for many bonus payouts.
A 5-Step Strategy Execution Framework
Here’s the framework I use with CEOs and Boards to accelerate time to revenue (note – this is for high-growth businesses, mid to late stage or those with substantial ARR):
1. Face Your Reality
Take an objective snapshot of your business:
- Review your P/L, growth trends, churn, and R&D investments.
- Drill into unit economics: gross margin, COGS, LTV and CAC relationship, and year-over-year changes.
- Understand the underlying factors driving your current state (e.g., flawed models vs. scale issues).
- For example, if your CAC to LTV is 1:2 or worse, is it because churn is high, deal size is too small, inefficient marketing, etc. Or, if your margin is below, let’s say 75%, is it because of the market or because you’ve been buying deals while you build your product? Get super clear on the underlying factors.
- Identify capability gaps in your product and team.
Execution Blueprint Tip: Separate symptoms from root causes. For example, if your margins are below 50% and you heavily discount your core product, is it because the product is subpar, you’re in the wrong business, or because your team can’t sell?
2. Evaluate Opportunities
Deeply understand your market:
- Go deep into understanding your market. How much TAM can you win at the current rate? What are the largest accounts, what is a typical buying cycle, and what can you realistically win based on data?
- Identify what it takes to achieve 2x or 3x growth. Where will this growth come from – expanding current customers or new wins?
- What will it take to reach profitability? Will your CAC get lower over time, will early deals accelerate future pipeline so you grow into your P/L, etc.?
- Determine whether to expand into new verticals or double down on existing ones.
- What does total opportunity look like in the next 3 years, and how much investment would you need?
Execution Blueprint Tip: Nothing replaces direct customer or prospect conversations.
3. Pick the Direction
Define your best, base, and worst-case scenarios:
- How can you align your business to market opportunities or fight the headwinds?
- Build a directional model to forecast P/L impacts.
- Factor in different scenarios such as win rates, M/A opportunities, and incremental investments in product, marketing, and people.
- Decide on investments needed and different growth models such as product-led, sales-led, or combination.
Execution Blueprint Tip: Focus on the right direction rather than precise numbers. What will you say no to? You can adjust your Excel model, but reversing direction mid-year is tough.
4. Assess Your Execution Capability
Ensure you can execute your chosen direction:
- Do you have the funding, and what tradeoffs would you need to make (what would you give up)?
- Do you have the right teams, and what would it take to build the right capabilities?
- Are you set up structurally from a people, process, and systems perspective to achieve these goals?
- Can you move as fast as you’d like in building your product, hiring new teams, etc.? How long of a ramp should you consider?
- Do you have alignment from the board to cross-functional teams?
Here is a framework I use with my executives when identifying where we need to focus our efforts to unblock execution. It’s called the Execution Capability Matrix. As you prepare to sequence your efforts, think critically about whether you have strong alignment across teams and the right talent for your goals.
Execution Blueprint Tip: If you have more than 5 key priorities (I believe 3 is a good number), you’re not aligned as a company
5. Sequence Your Plan
Prioritize and sequence initiatives to maximize ROI:
- Identify core levers directly tied to your strategic goals. This should be directly aligned to steps 3 and 4 above. Think of these as your core initiatives for the year.
- For example: If you’ve decided to spend the year reducing churn, then pick a few priorities directly aligned with fixing your product and customer success functions, and when to invest. If you decide that growth will come from going deeper in your current market, then pick a few core initiatives such as increasing win rate, increasing product attach, and perhaps efficient onboarding.
- Build an annual plan with clear milestones.
- Set up monthly and quarterly check-ins to ensure alignment.
Execution Blueprint Tip: Quantify expected results but allow room for learning and adjustment, especially with new initiatives.
Achieving your 2025 plans requires more than just hard work; it demands disciplined execution. By focusing on the foundational 20% of work, you can unlock 80% of the impact and gain the competitive Blueprint needed for success.
Your Next Step
As a CEO or leader, ask yourself: Are you solving the right problem, and can you even execute on it?
Using the 5 step framework above, align your team, allocate resources, and track progress relentlessly. If you’re ready to dive deeper and want an advisor who can help you drive execution, submit interest and let’s see if you’re a fit.
Tanvir Bhangoo is a strategic advisor, bestselling author, and speaker who helps CEOs and Boards in SaaS and tech execute high-impact growth plans. Learn more at tanvirbhangoo.com or follow him on LinkedIn.
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